About

From a linage of West Asian and European family members, who melded together eccentric esoteric and religious practice, I’ve come full circle. Born a witch- raised into religiosity – and having returned to my own fluidity within witchcraft, I present an overview of historical accounts and present day practice. Primarily this writing melds small amounts of historical magickal (socio-political and mythological) practice and brings it into contemporary settings with a leaning towards manipulating energy as a form of contemporary sorcery. I’m here to reclaim that which has been stolen.
#Iran #Sorcery #Witchcraft #Persian #DarkMagick

Potentially even before Cyrus the Great (550-530 BCE), Zoroastrianism or an early iteration of it, was the religion of Iran. A religion that saw duality play out in the fields of theology; a theological path that was less concerned with questions relating to why a ‘good God’ would permit evil, or at least less concerned than its following Abrahamic brother and subsequent persecutor, Islam. Zoroastrianism did how ever develop some of the first known ideas of ‘evil’ mainly contained in the Gathas. These written texts in the form of sacred hymns, were used as primary sources of spell-work and practices designed to be undertaken in order to ward of evil.

There are two forms of evil within the Gathas, these being intrinsic evil – evil born of itself, unable to do anything other than be evil and the second, inherently good people or spirits, who become tormented and do evil things. Gods are always seen as good and with a sacrifice to them, they are able to fight evil on our behalf. Intrinsic evil manifests as malevolent spirits or Daeva which occur in energetic or spirit form and then there are humans.

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The first recorded idea of evil people was in the form of a “sorcerer” – yātu or jādūg who are male counterpart to the female witch; pairikā or parīg. According to the scriptures the King of Persia, around 404 BC uttered “This which I have made—let no yātu and no kayada destroy it!” and this is the first mention of people as witches or sorcerers in Ancient Persia. Within the Pahlavi Rivāyat it came about that yātu and pairikā became affiliated with the Zoroastrian God of opposition; Ahriman. While much more was written about the male sorcerers than of women witches, when female witches were written about, they were cast in a much darker pretext. This was supposedly due to the presumption that women had a much more sinister nature and the perplexing fact that women would bleed, managing to survive such blood loss could only be explained as possession, since it were expected that one would die from this back before we knew better.

The worst of the female witches was that of the whore or prostitute (jahī or jahikā), by far the most dangerous, since it was said that the jahikā resist order, are adversarial, and thrive in chaos. And here is where we find contemporary practitioners of Persian mystic heretics and obscurantism, the modern day jahī, jādūg and pairikā’s, on the edge of chaos, discerning adversaries, witches and sorcerers, magic(k)ians of the old orders of Persia. From a time when menstruation had its own associated demon, when bleeding from the cunt was thought a disease, the witches return to their beginnings to claim for themselves what should have always been…تَأْثير